I have been lurking for a while here and just registered to participate.

Since Lion came out I was very distressed, because I worried that when my current iMac expires, any new Mac would not run Freehand any more.

I have already considered converting to Windows or to Corel Draw. (O.o)

For professional graphic design work I can bear to use Illus*traitor* a little, but there is no way in hell I will ever buy it for my private use and reward Adobe for their treachery.The things that ThePixelDoc said in this thread about Adobe, I agree 100% with!

The emergence of Expressive is an exciting new prospect and gives me hope!

The problem with the discount is that it isn't very much, and it isn't good for a discounted upgrade -- I was suckered into purchasing CS3 (as I'm sure many of us were) and now it is incompatible with Windows 7 and they no longer support it. What?? Freehand still works fine with Windows 7! Anyway, if I use the discount I still have to pay $400. But an upgrade is $250. And the upgrade won't open my Freehand files?!? Worthless. They still sell Freehand on their site for $400, by the way. Shameful and greedy. If they are still going to sell it, I can't understand why it is so hurtful to them to pay someone to upgrade it. Bug deal if it isn't their big moneymaker. Maybe it COULD be.

For me, the happiest solution would be learning about an application that could open old FreeHand files, and look and feel the same. Until that happens, I am happy to continue using it in emulation with VMWare Fusion.

Heartfelt thanks to all at FreeFreehand for trying. The effort was admirable and it must have been a LOT of time invested.A question for previous poster hbanks: can you give more details about the system you use for emulation - it sounds interesting. What hardware are you using, what OS do you run in emulation?

Thanks to all involved for their efforts. Obviously I am disappointed and as I already have CS5 and cannot abide Illustrator their offer was worse than derisory to me. I look forward to the emergence of Expressive and have already given support and will continue to use Freehand as long as I can.

Thanks for all your good help. I'm very interested in learning how/if there is a way for us to get our suggestions to the people who will be meeting with Adobe about features we think are important to see in Illustrator.

The single most important one for me is that Illustrator remains capable of opening FreeHand files. Like many of us, I have hundreds, if not a thousand or more, files in FH which would bankrupt me having to re-create in another application. That would be an unpaid endeavor ... as how do we tell clients they must pay to have their work recreated in order to get updates, etc. to their files.

Obviously I would love to see many other features, but without being able to open FH files, they become less important.

How do we get these requests to the team that will be presenting them?